New name for an established industry conference, the "Flash Memory Summit" has morphed into The "Future of Memory and Storage" which is definitely a good name with the acronym. Once again this year it was the rendez-vous of semi-conductor professionals plus a few other adjacent profiles. Plenty of new things, awards of course but also new products, technology directions and trends confirmed by vendors products iterations. A good show as usual, I hope you will enjoy this short recap.

The last FMS 2024 conference was the opportunity to celebrate Harriet Coverston, a real pioneer in the storage domain and especially in the data archiving space. Harriet just received the SuperWomen of FMS Leadership Award that rewards a brilliant carrier and strong industry contributions. After some times at Lawrence Livermore and Control Data Corp., she founded LSC in 1986 with famous SAM-FS and QFS, later acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2001 where she stayed 10 years. In 2011, she founded Versity Software as CTO with Bruce Gilpin, CEO, to address new data archiving challenges developing a modern data archiving platform. A great talk and a real honor to exchange with Harriet, a reference in storage, I hope you will enjoy the listening. Thank you Harriet.

Following the recent IT Press Tour and the very interesting session we had at MaxLinear, I decided to meet again the company and go more in details on Panther III, the storage accelerator card, well adopted by the market and recognized as one of the fastest in the industry. I talked with Mark Moran, Executive Director, and Pinaki Chanda, Director Software Engineering, during FMS, the famous conference now operating under a new name "The Future of Memory and Storage" and still with the same acronym. We discussed about the strategy of the company but go deeper into the product, its features, its performance and values delivered to users but also key partners. A very interesting exchange about this advanced technology paramount in this fast growing AI era. I hope you will enjoy listening to it. Thank you Mark and Pinaki.

Following ISC and the recent IT Press Tour with the 8th participation of DDN, not counting ones with Nexenta, Tegile or Tintri, before their respective acquisitions, I decided to record a new technical episode with the product leader at DDN, James Coomer. We spoke about the company of course but we insisted on ExaScaler and Infinia, their last high performance storage platform, and their approach of the HPC and AI with some differences but also many similarities. And many more things I hope you will enjoy. Thank you James.

Our data storage industry moves fast and I decided to record this recap of the first 6 months of 2024. It's a short episode but I covered multiples aspects with VC fundings, IPOs and Unicorns effects, M&As, some failures and surprising news, a few trends, technologies and products, some people moves and new companies. I hope you will enjoy it, it is a pretty good one during holidays.

As a usual and classic note, twice a year, Coldago Research publishes its Storage Unicorn report which presents the club and its selection of storage unicorns. This June 2024 edition, the 15th one listed 17 companies with a few change with Rubrik now a public company, WEKA joining the club following its last round and Cohesity key events early this year. By alpha order, they're Acronis, Barracuda Networks, Cohesity, DataCore, DDN, Druva, Infinidat, Kaseya, MinIO, Nasuni, OwnBackup, Qumulo, VAST Data, Veeam Software, Veritas Technologies, Wasabi Technologies. and WEKA. Enjoy the listening, it's a very short episode that invites you to dig into the topic.

Viking Enterprise Solutions, aka VES, a product division of Sanmina, a reference in compute and storage server design and manufacturing, participated recently to The IT Press Tour. It was the perfect time to understand who is Sanmina and VES, what they do, how they work for other IT companies developing their hardware solutions such as DDN, Infinidat or VAST Data, coupled potentially with some open source software. We discuss with Rick Kumar, SVP of VES, about the mission of the company, their expertise, the various use cases with AI of course but also go-to-market and revenue models. We conclude with some future directions, always interesting with entities like VES. I hope you would like this episode, enjoy your listening. Thank you Rick.

The 56th edition of The IT Press Tour took place un June in Silicon Valley, California.

We met 9 innovative companies all playing in IT Infrastructure, Cloud, Networking, Security, Data Management, Storage and I added AI. By alpha order it was Arc Compute, DDN, Hammerspace, Index Engines, Juicedata, MaxLinear, Oxide Computer, Tobiko Data and Viking Enterprise Solutions, a division of Sanmina. A very good edition again and I hope you will really enjoy listening to it.